Genre: Fiction
Have in the Library? Yes!
“In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her.” So begins “Exit West,” a graceful book about Nadia, a spirited and rebellious woman, and Saeed, a gentle and sensitive man. Their love story originates in this never-named city as it falls apart, and their lives are altered first in small ways, then in ways that are irreparable. Soon, they’re traveling through doors both literal and metaphoric, and the book blends the fantastical with the all-too-real in a way I’ve never quite encountered before in fiction. Interspersed vignettes bring us to farther flung locales all around the globe where, at the same as Saeed and Nadia are embarking on their journeys, people are moving, migrating, mingling. A man climbs through a window in Australia, Filipina women emerge from a dark alleyway in Shikoku, in Mexico a woman walks through a cantina and reclaims her daughter, in Prinsengracht, an old man gets a second chance. The sense of movement is momentous but there’s still a subtlety to the prose that, much like the doors themselves, you don’t entirely realize what’s happened until you’ve passed through.
This book was published in 2017. Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani writer better known for his book “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” This is a book for our time, about our modern world and the reordering and upheaval of people because of violence. And yet Hamid handles this subject with so much gentleness that it reads almost like a fable. His choice was interesting to me, and ultimately effective. Saeed and Nadia’s tale is sad, the sacrifices of immigrants presented in a straightforward way that seems all the more devastating: “She felt she was abandoning the old man…and so by making the promise he demanded she was make she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
But what I got out of this book is not sadness so much as wonder. I think this line (like so many of Hamid’s, beautiful in its simplicity) encapsulates that feeling best: “Throughout this time she had never moved, traveled, yes, but never moved, and yet it seemed the world had moved.”
